Robert J. Jackson Jr.

The White House officially announced Jackson's nomination to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on September 1, 2017, the Senate Banking Committee unanimously approved his nomination on November 1, 2017., and he was sworn in as Commissioner on January 11, 2018. On 21 December 2019, it was reported that the White House is expected to nominate an attorney in Jackson's office, Caroline Crenshaw, who is also a Democratic attorney at the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to take over Jackson, who is the current Democratic Commissioner in the SEC and would vacate his position next year in June 2020. Senate Minority Leader and Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer has sent Crenshaw's name to the White House as a nominee for the post of the new Commissioner of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission from the Democratic taking over Jackson, who is also a Democrat.

Jackson has criticized stock exchanges for having tiered systems for ordinary investors and wealthier investors to get prices and information, calling it a form of rent extraction and a tax on ordinary investors. He argues that the SEC’s exchange rules were created for not-for-profit exchanges, but now that most exchanges are for-profit, this is no longer a suitable approach. He called for “greater transparency about how exchanges make their money…[and] a clear and uniform approach to disclosing revenues across exchanges and over time.”   

Jackson commissioned a panel to reform insider trading laws with former US Attorney Preet Bharara, arguing that the US lacks a law that expressly bans insider trading, and instead, “the government brings insider-trading cases under a Depression-era law that generally prohibits ‘fraud’ in the securities markets. As a result, what we now understand as the laws against insider trading have been written by federal judges…the result is a legal haziness…”

Jackson has been outspoken on the issue of requiring companies to disclose cyber-breaches, specifically noting the opportunity that it gives executives for insider trading and the larger role that counsel and c-suites should play in security and disclosure. He has also released analysis showing that “about 90% of known cyber incidents at public companies went undisclosed in regulatory filings in 2018…down from 97% in 2017.”

A paper in September 2015 uncovered a similar advantage enjoyed by certain traders called The 8-K Trading Gap, showing that company insiders traded their company's stock on the open market and profited doing so during the 4-day window between when market-moving information is known by company insiders and when they are required to disclose it to the public in an 8-K filing. Recently, this work was cited by Senator Chris Van Hollen before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney before the House Financial Services Committee discussing insider trading in the context of trading by Equifax executives after that company's 2017 hack.

In November 2014, Jackson co-authored a paper titled How the SEC Helps Speedy Traders, which showed how the SEC allowed certain investors early access to key information in public company filings through the SEC's file transfer protocol (FTP) and public dissemination service (PDS). The gaps, 11-seconds and 10-seconds long, allowed investors employing high-frequency trading to make significant profit from this early access. After being reported by the Wall Street Journal, the Senate Banking Committee urged the SEC to fix the disparity in access, though Jackson showed that the gap persisted weeks later.

Jackson was born in the Bronx and is a fan of the New York Yankees. He attended Blind Brook High School. His mother is a retired teacher from the Blind Brook School District. At his SEC nomination hearing, he told the story of his parents—his father working as an accounting clerk at an encyclopedia company and his mother holding part-time jobs to make ends meet, but their savings in the American stock market allowed him to attend college.

He received the Columbia Law School 2012 Willis L.M. Reese Prize for Excellence in Teaching, and has taught abroad in China, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Prior to joining the Columbia Law faculty in 2009, he worked in investment banking at Bear Stearns, specialized in executive compensation and corporate governance at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen, & Katz, and served as deputy director to Kenneth Feinberg at the United States Treasury, helping to establish executive pay rules for corporations such as AIG, Citigroup, and General Motors following the financial crisis of 2007–2008. He also developed Obama administration proposals on executive compensation and corporate governance that became part of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and testified before the Senate Banking Committee about agency shortcomings on proposed rules for bonus compensation, rules which were later amended.

Jackson went on to attend Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School, where he received, respectively, his Master of Public Policy and Juris Doctor. At Harvard's Kennedy School, Jackson along with co-author Jesse Jannetta won the Taubman Prize for best thesis for their policy analysis of the Massachusetts Parole Board's Regional Reentry Center Initiative. He trained under Lucian Bebchuk at Harvard Law School, and following his graduation in 2005, was appointed the Terence M. Considine Research Fellow in Law and Economics by the law school and the Olin Foundation.

Jackson attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated summa cum laude with bachelor's degrees in philosophy and finance. As an undergraduate, he was a submatriculant in the MBA program at the Wharton School with a concentration in finance. Prior to receiving his MBA in 2000, Jackson spent his summer as a Judicial Intern at the Supreme Court working for James C. Duff, Administrative Assistant to the Chief Justice.

The "middle-market IPO tax" refers to the seven-percent fee investment banks have charged middle-market firms to go public, with little variation, since the 1990s. Jackson has spoken on its role in firms increasingly staying private, citing analysis that over 96% of recent midsized IPOs featured a spread of exactly 7% and arguing that this is too high for public markets to be competitive compared to private markets.

Robert J. Jackson Jr. (born February 14, 1977) is an American lawyer and academic. He currently serves as a professor of law at New York University School of Law, where he is on public service leave. Jackson's research emphasizes the empirical study of executive compensation and corporate governance matters. On September 1, 2017, the White House announced that President Donald Trump had nominated Jackson to fill the open Democratic seat on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Jackson was unanimously approved by the Senate Banking Committee for the seat, and thereafter unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on December 21, 2017.